An Unfinished Life Part 1
An Unfinished Life.
by Robert Dallek.
Preface
Why another Kennedy book? I was asked repeatedly during the five years I worked on this biography. The availability of new materials-written contemporary doc.u.ments, telephone and Oval Office tapes, and entire oral histories or parts thereof-seemed ample reason to revisit Kennedy's personal and public lives. I also took guidance from science writer Jacob Bronowski: "Ask an impertinent question and you are on your way to a pertinent answer." As I worked my way through the records, I was startled by how many fresh things could be said based on the combination of old and new files about the man, his family, and his political career. To cite just a few examples, new doc.u.ments reveal more clearly the cause of the accident that killed Joseph Kennedy Jr. in World War II, how Bobby Kennedy became attorney general in 1960, and what JFK thought of U.S. military chiefs, their plans for an invasion of Cuba, the American press corps in Saigon, and the wisdom of an expanded war in Vietnam.
As with all our most interesting public figures, Kennedy is an elusive character, a man who, like all politicians, worked hard to emphasize his favorable attributes and hide his limitations. He and those closest to him were extraordinarily skillful at creating positive images that continue to shape public impressions. My objective has not been to write another debunking book (these have been in ample supply in recent years) but to penetrate the veneer of glamour and charm to reconstruct the real man or as close to it as possible. The result is not a sharply negative portrait but a description of someone with virtues and defects that make him seem both exceptional and ordinary-a man of uncommon intelligence, drive, discipline, and good judgment on the one hand, and of lifelong physical suffering and emotional problems on the other. I have not emphasized one aspect over the other but have tried to bring them into balance. Learning, for example, a great deal more than any biographer has previously known about Kennedy's medical history allowed me to see not only the extent to which he hid his infirmities from public view but also the man's exceptional strength of character. In addition, I have tried to understand his indisputable womanizing, including previously unknown instances of his compulsive philandering. More significant, I have ventured answers to questions about whether his health problems and behavior in any way undermined his performance of presidential duties.
I have also tried to judiciously a.s.sess the negative and positive family influences on his character, the record of his navy service, his House and Senate careers, and, most important, his presidential policies on the economy, civil rights, federal aid to education, health insurance for seniors, and poverty, and, even more consequentially, on dealings with Russia, nuclear weapons, s.p.a.ce, Cuba, and Vietnam. I have not hesitated to say what I believe Kennedy might have done about the many ongoing problems certain to have faced him in a second term, however open to question these conclusions may be. "It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it," said Joseph Joubert, a French philosopher of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I believe this biography provides the most authoritative discussion to date on Kennedy the man and his political career. Nonetheless, however much it may be a significant advance in understanding, I have no illusion that I am recording the last word on John F. Kennedy. The economist Thorstein Veblen was surely right when he cautioned that "the outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before." Add to this the man's almost mythical importance to Americans and hundreds of millions of people around the globe and you can be certain that future generations will be eager for renewed attention to him in the context of their own times.
R.D.
February 2003
PART ONE
Growing Up
Every man had to test himself, and if he was courageous and lucky he found maturity. That was all the reward you could ask for, or were ent.i.tled to: growing up.
- Ward Just, The Translator The Translator (1991) (1991)
CHAPTER 1
Beginnings
George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life: ... "I dream things that never were-and I say: Why not?"
- John F. Kennedy before the Irish Parliament, June 28, 1963
IN AUGUST 1947, John F. Kennedy traveled to Ireland. The trip was notable for several reasons. Kennedy was first and foremost a "good New Englander," an American-so said the Irish amba.s.sador to the United States-who had all but lost his connection to the old country. Indeed, recalling how often Jack Kennedy had visited England in the 1930s and early 1940s without going to Ireland, the amba.s.sador archly described Kennedy as "an English American." "Many people made much of his Irish ancestry," one of Kennedy's English friends said. But he was "a European ... more English than Irish." Now, at long last, he was going home. That was not, however, how his father saw it. For Joseph Patrick Kennedy, whose drive for social acceptance shadowed most of what he did, being described as an "Irishman" was cause for private rage. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it!" he once sputtered after a Boston newspaper identified him that way. "I was born in this country! My children were born in this country! What the h.e.l.l does someone have to do to become an American?"
But his son had if not formed a deep emotional attachment, at least taken his cue from his mother's father, John F. Fitzgerald. "There seems to be some disagreement as to whether my grandfather Fitzgerald came from Wexford, Limerick or Tipperary," Kennedy would later recall. "And it is even more confusing as to where my great[-]grandmother came from-because her son-who was the Mayor of Boston-used to claim his mother came from whichever Irish county had the most votes in the audience he was addressing at that particular time." And indeed, when the twenty-nine-year-old had first run for Congress the year before, Irish Americans in his district had been hesitant to support Kennedy because of his lack of ethnic identification, let alone pride.
Officially, Kennedy was on a fact-finding mission to study the potential workings of the Marshall Plan in a Europe still reeling from the devastation wrought by the Second World War. Unofficially, it was a chance to relax with Kathleen Kennedy Hartington, Jack's favorite younger sister, who was even more "English American" than he was. Though her husband, William Cavendish Hartington, who was in line to become the next duke of Devonshire, had died in the war, Kathleen had stayed in England, where the Devonshires treated her with fond regard. They gave her free run of their several great estates, including Lismore Castle in southern Ireland's County Waterford, a twelfth-century mansion once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh. Kathleen called it the "most perfect place" in the world.
Kathleen asked Jack to join her for a vacation at Lismore, where she promised to bring him together with former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden; Pamela Churchill, the divorced wife of Winston's son, Randolph; and other prominent English social and political lions. "Anthony Eden arrives today," Kathleen wrote an American friend, "so by the end of the week he and Jack will have fixed up the state of the world."
Like Kathleen, Jack Kennedy had been schooled to move comfortably in privileged circles. Jack and Kathleen did not think of themselves as anything but American aristocrats. Wit, charm, and intelligence added to the cachet he carried as a congressman and the son of one of America's wealthiest entrepreneurs who himself was a former amba.s.sador to Britain.
Yet those who met John Kennedy for the first time in 1947 found little a.s.surance in his appearance. Though having pa.s.sed his thirtieth birthday in the spring, he looked like "a college boy," or at best a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in political science. He contributed to the impression with his casual attire, appearing sometimes on the House floor in khaki pants and a rumpled seersucker jacket with a shirttail dangling below his coat or in the House cafeteria line in sweater and sneakers. At six feet and only 140 pounds, his slender body, gaunt and freckled face, and full head of tousled brown hair made him seem younger than his thirty years. Even when he dressed in formal suits, which was not often, it did not make him look older or like a congressman. "He wore the most G.o.dawful suits," Mary Davis, his secretary, said. "Horrible looking, hanging from his frame." Unlike so many members of the House who self-consciously dressed the part, Kennedy reflected his sense of ent.i.tlement in his informal dress. But it did not encourage an impression of maturity, and it was difficult for most colleagues to take him seriously. He initially struck veteran congressmen as the son of a famous family who had inherited his office rather than earned it. Sometimes he didn't impress them at all. "Well, how do you like that?" he asked his congressional office staff one morning. "Some people got into the elevator and asked me for the fourth floor." During his first week in the House, a veteran congressman who mistook him for a page demanded a copy of a bill until Jack informed the astonished member that they were colleagues.
Nevertheless, he offended almost no one. Although he conveyed a certain coolness or self-control, his radiant smile and genuine openness made him immediately likable. "The effect he has on women voters was almost naughty," New York Times New York Times columnist James Reston later wrote. "Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him." Another columnist saw something in his appearance that suggested "to the suggestible that he is lost, stolen or strayed-a prince in exile, perhaps, or a very wealthy orphan." columnist James Reston later wrote. "Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him." Another columnist saw something in his appearance that suggested "to the suggestible that he is lost, stolen or strayed-a prince in exile, perhaps, or a very wealthy orphan."
A visit to New Ross, a market town on the banks of the Barrow River fifty miles east of Lismore, filled some of Jack's time in Ireland. Kathleen, who spent the day playing golf with her guests, did not join him. Instead, Pamela Churchill, whom Jack asked "rather quietly, rather apologetically," went along. They drove for five hours in Kathleen's huge American station wagon over rutted roads along Ireland's scenic southeastern coast before reaching the outskirts of the town.
New Ross was not casually chosen. As they approached, with only a letter from his aunt Loretta, his father's sister, to guide him, Jack stopped to ask directions to the Kennedy house. ("Which Kennedys will it be that you'll be wanting?" the man replied.) Jack tried a little white farmhouse on the edge of the village with a front yard full of chickens and geese. A lady surrounded by six kids, "looking just like all the Kennedys," greeted him with suspicion. After sending for her husband, who was in the fields, the family invited Jack and Pamela for tea in their thatched-roof cottage with a dirt floor. Though Pamela was impressed with the family's simple dignity, she compared the visit to a scene from Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road Tobacco Road.
Jack believed that he had discovered his third cousins and seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly. Asking if he could do anything for them, the cousins proposed that he "drive the children around the village in the station wagon," which he did to their pleasure and his. For her part, Pamela clearly did not understand "the magic of the afternoon." Neither did Kathleen, who was angry when Jack returned late for dinner. "Did they have a bathroom?" she asked snidely.
The successful striving of her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents-the unceasing ambition of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys-had catapulted the family into another realm, an ocean and a century apart from the relatives left behind in Ireland. In America anything was possible-the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys were living proof. For most of the family, these Kennedys of New Ross were something foreign, something best ignored or forgotten. But not for Jack.
JACK HAD ONLY RUDIMENTARY KNOWLEDGE about his distant ancestors. He knew that his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had come to East Boston during the great potato famines of the late 1840s, worked as a cooper making wagon staves and whiskey barrels, married Bridget Murphy, and fathered three daughters and a son before he died of cholera in 1858 when only thirty-five. about his distant ancestors. He knew that his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had come to East Boston during the great potato famines of the late 1840s, worked as a cooper making wagon staves and whiskey barrels, married Bridget Murphy, and fathered three daughters and a son before he died of cholera in 1858 when only thirty-five.
Jack also knew that his great-grandfather on his mother's side, Thomas Fitzgerald, had clung to his farm in Ireland until 1854, when the famine drove him to America as well. Initially settling in Acton, twenty-five miles west of Boston, his impoverishment as a farmer forced him to take up life in Boston's North End Irish ghetto, a crowded slum of wooden tenements. One contemporary described it as a "dreary, dismal" desolate world in which all was "mean, nasty, inefficient [and] forbidding," except for the Catholic Church, which provided spiritual comfort and physical beauty.
In 1857 Thomas married Rosanna c.o.x, with whom he had twelve children-nine of whom reached maturity, an amazing survival rate in a time when infant mortality was a common event. Thomas, who lived until 1885, surviving Rosanna by six years, prospered first as a street peddler of household wares and then in a grocery business, which doubled as a North End tavern in the evenings. Income from tenements he bought and rented to Irish laborers made his family comfortable and opened the way to greater success for his offspring.
The limits of Jack's knowledge about his Irish relatives was partly the result of his parents' upward mobility and their eagerness to replace their "Irishness" with an American ident.i.ty. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jack's mother, took pains to instill American values in the children, ignoring their Irish roots and taking them to the storied landmarks of the country's Revolutionary past around Boston. This att.i.tude differed little from that of other ethnic groups, who tried to meet the demands of being an American by forgetting about their Old World past, but in stratified Boston it took on special meaning. Rose and Joe were understandably eager to insulate the family from the continual snubs that Irish Americans suffered at the hands of local Brahmins, well-off Protestant Americans whose roots went back to the earliest years of the Republic. Although Rose and Joe enjoyed privileged lives, their tangible sense of being outsiders in their native land remained a social reality they struggled to overcome.
The Boston in which Joe and Rose grew up was self-consciously "American." It was the breeding ground for the values and spirit that had given birth to the nation and the center of America's most famous university where so many of the country's most influential leaders had been educated. Sn.o.bbery or cla.s.s consciousness was as much a part of the city's landscape as Boston Common. Coming from the wrong side of the tracks in most American cities was no fixed impediment to individual success. But in Boston, where "the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to G.o.d," rising above one's station was an enterprise for only the most ambitious.
What vivid sense of family history there was began with Jack's two grandfathers-Patrick Joseph Kennedy and John F. Fitzgerald, both impressively successful men who achieved local fame and gave their children the wherewithal to enjoy comfortable lives. Patrick Joseph Kennedy was born in 1858, the year his father died. In an era when no public support program came to the aid of a widow with four children, Bridget Murphy Kennedy, Patrick's mother, supported the family as a saleswoman and shopkeeper. At age fourteen, P.J., as he was called, left school to work on the Boston docks as a stevedore to help support his mother and three older sisters. In the 1880s, with money he had saved from his modest earnings, he launched a business career by buying a saloon in Haymarket Square. In time, he bought a second establishment by the docks. To capitalize on the social drinking of upper-cla.s.s Boston, P.J. purchased a third bar in an upscale hotel, the Maverick House.
With his handlebar mustache, white ap.r.o.n, and red sleeve garters, the stocky, blue-eyed, red-haired P.J. cut a handsome figure behind the bar of his taverns. By all accounts, he was a good listener who gained the regard and even affection of his patrons. Before he was thirty, his growing prosperity allowed him to buy a whiskey-importing business, P. J. Kennedy and Company, that made him a leading figure in Boston's liquor trade.
Likable, always ready to help less fortunate fellow Irishmen with a little cash and some sensible advice, P.J. enjoyed the approval and respect of most folks in East Boston, a mixed Boston neighborhood of upscale Irish and Protestant elite. Beginning in 1884, he converted his popularity into five consecutive one-year terms in the Ma.s.sachusetts Lower House, followed by three two-year terms in the state senate. Establishing himself as one of Boston's princ.i.p.al Democratic leaders, he was invited to give one of the seconding speeches for Grover Cleveland at the party's 1888 national convention in St. Louis.
But campaigning, speech making, and legislative maneuvering were less appealing to him than the behind-the-scenes machinations that characterized so much of Boston politics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After leaving the senate in 1895, P.J. spent his political career in various appointive offices-elections commissioner and fire commissioner-as the backroom boss of Boston's Ward Two, and as a member of his party's unofficial Board of Strategy. At board meetings over sumptuous lunches in room eight of the Quincy House hotel near Scollay Square, P.J. and three other power brokers from Charlestown and the South and North Ends chose candidates for local and statewide offices and distributed patronage.
There was time for family, too. In 1887 P.J. married Mary Augusta Hickey, a member of an affluent "lace curtain" Irish family from the upscale suburb of Brockton. The daughter of a successful businessman and the sister of a police lieutenant, a physician with a Harvard medical degree, and a funeral home director, Hickey had solidified Kennedy's move into the newly emerging Irish middle cla.s.s, or as legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curley mockingly called them, "cut gla.s.s" Irish or FIFs ("First Irish Families"). By the time he died in 1929, P.J. had indeed joined the ranks of the cut-gla.s.s set, holding an interest in a coal company and a substantial amount of stock in a bank, the Columbia Trust Company. His wealth afforded his family of one son, Joseph Patrick, and two daughters an attractive home on Jeffries Point in East Boston.
John F. Fitzgerald was better known in Boston than P.J. and had a greater influence on Jack's life. Born in 1863, John F. was the fourth of twelve children. As a boy and a young man, his father's standing as a successful businessman and his innate talents gained him admission to Boston's storied Latin School (training ground for the offspring of the city's most important families, including the Adamses, John, John Quincy, and Henry), where he excelled at athletics and compiled a distinguished academic record, graduating with honors. Earning a degree at Boston College, the city's Jesuit university, John F.-or Johnnie Fitz or Fitzie, as friends called him-entered Harvard Medical School in 1884. When his father died in the spring of 1885, he abandoned his medical education, which had been more his father's idea than his own, to care for his six younger brothers. Taking a job in the city's Customs House as a clerk, he simultaneously converted an affinity for people and politics into a job as a secretary to Matthew Keany, one of the Democratic party's North End ward bosses.
In 1891 Fitzie won election to a seat on Boston's Common Council, where he overcame resistance from representatives of more affluent districts to spend $350,000 on a public park for his poor North End const.i.tuents. The following year, when Keany died, Fitzgerald's seven-year apprenticeship in providing behind-the-scenes services to const.i.tuents and manipulating local power made him Keany's logical successor.
He was a natural politician-a charming, impish, affable lover of people who perfected the "Irish switch": chatting amiably with one person while pumping another's hand and gazing fondly at a third. His warmth of character earned him yet another nickname, "Honey Fitz," and he gained a reputation as the only politician who could sing "Sweet Adeline" sober and get away with it. A pixielike character with florid face, bright eyes, and sandy hair, he was a showman who could have had a career in vaudeville.
But politics, with all the brokering that went into arranging alliances and the hoopla that went into campaigning, was his calling. A verse of the day ran: "Honey Fitz can talk you blind / on any subject you can find / Fish and fishing, motor boats / Railroads, streetcars, getting votes." His gift of gab became known as Fitzblarney, and his followers as "dearos," a shortened version of his description of his district as "the dear old North End."
Fitzgerald's amiability translated into electoral successes. In 1892 he overcame internal bickering among the ward bosses to win election to the state senate. Compiling a progressive voting record and a reputation as an astute legislator eager to meet the needs of every const.i.tuent, Fitzgerald put himself forward in 1894 for the only sure Democratic congressional seat in Ma.s.sachusetts, Boston's Ninth District. His candidacy pitted him against his fellow bosses on the Strategy Board, who backed inc.u.mbent congressman Joseph O'Neil. Running a brilliant campaign that effectively played on suffering caused by the panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression, Fitzgerald's torchlight parades and promises of public programs produced an unprecedented turnout. Also helped by a division among the bosses, who responded to his candidacy by failing to unite against him, the thirty-one-year-old Fitzgerald won a decisive primary victory.
During three terms in Congress, Fitzgerald voted consistently for measures serving local and statewide needs, for laws favoring progressive income taxes over higher protective tariffs, and for a continuation of unrestricted immigration. Ma.s.sachusetts' senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a tall slender Brahmin who, with his Vand.y.k.e beard and courtly manner, could not have been more of a contrast to Fitzgerald, once lectured the Irishman on the virtues of barring inferior peoples-indigestible aliens-from corrupting the United States. "You are an impudent young man," Lodge began. "Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?" Fitzgerald replied: "As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships."
At the end of three terms as one of only three Catholics in the House, Fitzgerald announced his decision not to run again. It was a prelude to gaining the post he wished above all, mayor of Boston. During the next five years, while he waited for a favorable moment to run, he prospered as the publisher of a local newspaper, The Republic The Republic. Demonstrating a keen business sense, Fitzgerald substantially increased department-store advertising in his pages by running stories of special interest to women.
One of the city's leading political power brokers as the boss of the North End's Ward Six, despite having moved to Concord and then Dorchester, Fitzgerald was in a strong position to become mayor when the inc.u.mbent died in 1905. But another round of opposition from his fellow bosses, including P.J., put his election in doubt. In response, he devised a shrewd anti-boss campaign that appealed to current progressive antagonism to undemocratic machine politics. Despite a bruising primary fight and another closely contested race against a formidable Republican, Fitzgerald gained the prize, chanting, "The people not the bosses must rule! Bigger, better, busier Boston." Within hours of winning the election, he showed up at P. J. Kennedy's East Boston office to say that there were no hard feelings about P.J.'s opposition to him. It was, two family biographers later said, "a first hurrah for the dynasty to come."
HONEY FITZ HAD COMPLEMENTED his political and business successes with marriage to his second cousin, Mary Josephine Hannon, or Josie, as intimates called her. They had met first in Acton at the Hannons' farm in September 1878, when Fitzgerald was fifteen and Josie thirteen. As he remembered it, he immediately fell in love with the beautiful girl to whom he would be married for sixty-two years, but Fitzgerald had to wait eleven years before Josie's family put aside their concerns about the consequences of having Josie marry a blood relative, however distant. The union produced six children, three sons and three daughters. his political and business successes with marriage to his second cousin, Mary Josephine Hannon, or Josie, as intimates called her. They had met first in Acton at the Hannons' farm in September 1878, when Fitzgerald was fifteen and Josie thirteen. As he remembered it, he immediately fell in love with the beautiful girl to whom he would be married for sixty-two years, but Fitzgerald had to wait eleven years before Josie's family put aside their concerns about the consequences of having Josie marry a blood relative, however distant. The union produced six children, three sons and three daughters.
The eldest of the Fitzgerald children, Rose Elizabeth, was Fitz's favorite. Praying for a daughter who might fulfill his dreams of winning acceptance into polite society, Honey Fitz envisioned Rose's life as a storybook tale of proper upbringing and social acclaim. As Rose later viewed it, her father succeeded: "There have been times when I felt I was one of the more fortunate people in the world, almost as if Providence, or Fate, or Destiny, as you like, had chosen me for special favors."
From her birth in the summer of 1890, she led a privileged life. When Rose was seven, Fitz and Josie moved the family to the Boston suburb of West Concord, where Rose remembers "a big, old rambling ... wonderfully comfortable house" and the traditional pleasures and satisfactions of life in a small New England town: "serenity, order, family affection, horse-and-buggy rides to my grandparents' nearby home, climbing apple trees, picking wild flowers." There was the excitement of a father coming home on weekends from Washington, where, in Rose's limited understanding, he was something called a "congressman" doing important things. Whatever her sadness at his frequent absences, she remembered "the absolute thrill" of driving to the Concord train station to meet him and his affectionate greeting, with "a wonderful present" always pulled from his bags. She also recalled a trip to the White House at age seven with her father, where President William McKinley warmly greeted them and gave her a carnation. "There was no one in the world like my father," she said. "Wherever he was, there was magic in the air." There were also the memories of the matched pair of beautiful black horses that pulled the family carriage and of her own rig that at twelve she began driving to the Concord library to borrow books.
There were also the summers in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where Boston's prominent Irish families would seek the pleasure of one another's company and relief from the heat. A beachfront crowded with hotels, cottages, and gregarious folks strolling, sunning themselves, swimming, fishing, shopping, playing cards, and eating together in the Brunswick Hotel's huge dining room, Old Orchard was described as "the typical watering place for those who detest the name of solitude." Rose remembered the joy of playing with other children and being surrounded by relatives and family friends who "visited back and forth constantly."
In 1904, having grown affluent on the returns from The Republic, The Republic, the Fitzgeralds moved to suburban Dorchester, where their growing family of three girls and two boys lived in a sprawling fifteen-room house with a "scrollwork porch, mansard turret, and stained-gla.s.s insert in the front door portraying what Fitzie insisted was the family's coat of arms." Rose attended the Dorchester High School for Girls and, like her proper Bostonian Beacon Hill counterparts, rounded out her education with private lessons in French, dancing, piano, and voice. the Fitzgeralds moved to suburban Dorchester, where their growing family of three girls and two boys lived in a sprawling fifteen-room house with a "scrollwork porch, mansard turret, and stained-gla.s.s insert in the front door portraying what Fitzie insisted was the family's coat of arms." Rose attended the Dorchester High School for Girls and, like her proper Bostonian Beacon Hill counterparts, rounded out her education with private lessons in French, dancing, piano, and voice.
Dorchester's remove from the center of Boston allowed Fitz to insulate Rose and the family from the rough-and-tumble politics of his 1905 mayoral campaign. Though now fifteen, Rose had only "a hazy idea of what was happening." This was a good thing, for it was a contest with much name-calling and ugly innuendoes about her father's private life and public dealings that would have offended any loving daughter, especially one as starry-eyed as Rose.
Rose's sheltered life extended into her twenties. At seventeen, as the mayor's vivacious, intelligent daughter, Rose had become something of a Boston celebrity, in attendance at "all manner of political and social events." Wellesley was an ideal college choice for so talented and prominent a young woman: It represented the chance to enter an exciting universe of intellectual and political discourse in the country's finest women's college. But believing her too young and impressionable, Fitz enrolled her in an elite Catholic school, Boston's Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she received instruction in deportment and feminine virtues promising to make her a model wife and mother.
At the close of Rose's year in Sacred Heart, the Fitzgeralds took their two eldest daughters on a grand European tour. Ostensibly, it was to broaden the girls' education. But Fitz, who had lost a reelection bid as mayor in 1907 and was under suspicion of lining his pockets during his two-year term, saw the summer trip as a chance to shield Rose and her sister Agnes from press coverage of his wrongdoing. To keep them away from the unpleasant public gossip and discourage a budding romance with Joseph Patrick Kennedy, P.J.'s son, the child of a family with less social standing, Fitz also decided to enroll Rose and Agnes for the 1908-09 academic year in a Sacred Heart convent school in Holland. Attended mainly by the daughters of French and German aristocrats and well-off merchant families, it was a more cosmopolitan version of its Boston counterpart.
After coming home in the summer of 1909, Rose took refuge from the political wars with another year of schooling at the Sacred Heart Convent in Manhattanville, New York. At the close of that year, she returned to Boston ready to a.s.sume a large role in her father's second term, which ran from 1910 to 1912. With two small children to care for and little patience for the duties of a political first lady, Josie left the part to Rose, who filled it with a style and grace reflecting her advantaged upbringing and education. She became Honey Fitz's constant "hostess-companion-helper," traveling with him to Chicago and Kansas on city business, to the Panama Ca.n.a.l to consider its effect on Boston's future as an international trade center, to western Europe to advance Boston's commerce with its princ.i.p.al cities, to meet President William Howard Taft at the White House, and to attend the 1912 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore that nominated New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson for president. As one biographer records: "Fitzgerald delighted in the good looks of his daughter, in her intelligence, her presence of mind and superb social skills... . She proved to be her father's equal in conversation, curiosity, dancing, athletic ability and powers of endurance and even in the capacity for fascinating reporters," who gave her front-page coverage in Boston's newspapers.
Nothing more clearly marked Rose as a local leading light than her coming-out party in January 1911. The state's most prominent figures were counted among the 450 guests in attendance. Even the normal social barriers between Protestants and Catholics fell away for the occasion: Ma.s.sachusetts' governor-elect, two congressmen, Boston's district attorney and city councilmen-who declared the day a holiday-rubbed shoulders with wealthy and fashionable bankers, businessmen, attorneys, physicians, and clergymen.
By the conventions of the time, Rose's debut at age twenty was a prelude to courtship and marriage. She certainly did not lack for suitors, but by accepted standards, they did not include Protestants. The "mistrust" and "resentment" between Boston's Brahmins and its Irish Catholics caused them to have "as little as possible to do with each other." And even though her father had fostered better relations by joining with Brahmin James Jackson Storrow to establish the Boston City Club, a place where both sides could meet in "a neutral and socially relaxed atmosphere," Rose saw the divide as "one of those elementary facts of life not worth puzzling about." Besides, there were enough eligible Catholic men who could measure up to her status, including, she believed, P.J.'s son, Joe, whom she had known almost her entire life and who impressed her-if not her own father-as a most desirable mate.
DESPITE BOSTON'S CULTURAL DIVIDE, Joe, like Rose, had no sense of inhibition about reaching the highest rungs of the country's economic and social ladders. His parents and their families had gained material comforts and social standing that had put them in the upper reaches of the American middle cla.s.s. And like the business t.i.tans of the late-nineteenth century-Diamond Jim Brady, Andrew Carnegie, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller-whose backgrounds and middle-cla.s.s beginnings had acted as no bar to their acquisition of vast wealth and international fame, Joe Kennedy could entertain similar dreams. Joe, like Rose, had no sense of inhibition about reaching the highest rungs of the country's economic and social ladders. His parents and their families had gained material comforts and social standing that had put them in the upper reaches of the American middle cla.s.s. And like the business t.i.tans of the late-nineteenth century-Diamond Jim Brady, Andrew Carnegie, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller-whose backgrounds and middle-cla.s.s beginnings had acted as no bar to their acquisition of vast wealth and international fame, Joe Kennedy could entertain similar dreams.
Born in 1888, Joe grew up in an era when America's greatest heroes were daring entrepreneurs who not only enriched themselves but greatly expanded the national wealth by creating the infrastructure of an industrial society-steel, cheap energy, railroads, and financial instruments to grow the economy. Never mind that many were left behind in the rush to affluence: The social Darwinian code of the time, by which Joe was guided throughout his life, gave legitimacy to the view that the innately talented and virtuous succeeded while the less deserving made only modest gains or fell by the wayside. It was the natural order of things, and no sense of injustice need attach to wide gaps between the richest and poorest Americans. Of course, there was nothing against the fortunate sharing some of their largesse with needy Americans; indeed, the most well off were obliged to help the least advantaged. But to impute any inhibition on the acc.u.mulation of wealth from this obligation was never a part of Joe's outlook or that of other contemporary self-made men. As a boy, Joe had an oak bookcase stacked with the works of Horatio Alger Jr., which one of his sisters said he read avidly. Although Alger's stories were more attuned to the world of a rural pre-Civil War America, his rags-to-riches theme held a constant appeal to ambitious, up-and-about boys and young men like Joe Kennedy. Similarly, "mind power," or a belief in self-manipulation or success through positive thinking, which began to have a strong hold on the popular imagination at the turn of the century, captivated Joe. As he made his way in the world, Joe never tired of reminding people that anyone with G.o.d-given talents could figure out how to succeed; it was largely a matter of will.
As a teenager, Joe had already made clear that he was determined to rise above the ordinary. There were the usual things boys did then to make a little money: sell newspapers on the docks and candy and peanuts to tourists on a harbor excursion boat, light gas lamps and stoves in the homes of Orthodox Jews on holy days, deliver hats for a haberdasher, work as an office boy in his father's bank. But Joe had an urge to make money in a more inventive way. At the age of fifteen, he organized a neighborhood baseball team, the a.s.sumptions. As the team's business manager, coach, and first baseman, he bought uniforms, rented a ball field, scheduled the games, and collected enough money from spectators to make a profit. When some of his teammates complained that he was too domineering and that they had no say about anything, Joe made it clear he didn't care. There could be only one boss, and he would settle for nothing less. Summing up his personal philosophy, Joe told his sister: "If you can't be captain, don't play."
Because she believed that Joe was special, his mother decided to use the family's social standing and affluence to move her son from East Boston's Catholic Xaverian School to Boston Latin. It was not unheard-of for aspiring Catholic families to seek and win admission for a son to Boston Latin; Rose's father had of course been a student there in the 1870s. But when Joe attended the school in September 1901, the redheaded, freckled-faced, muscular thirteen-year-old Irish kid from across the harbor was in a distinct minority among the scions of Beacon Hill and Back Bay families.
It did not stop Joe from making a special mark at the school. Although he never stamped himself out as an especially good student, he excelled in extracurricular activities and athletics, becoming the colonel on a drill team that won a citywide compet.i.tion, captain of the baseball team, and in his senior year, the player with the city's highest high school batting average, for which he won the Mayor's Cup, presented by His Honor John F. Fitzgerald. Admired by his fellow students for his accomplishments on the diamond and for his warm personality and loyalty to his friends, Joe was also elected president of his senior cla.s.s.
Reflecting the drive and self-help outlook that dominated his thinking, Joe later said that Boston Latin "somehow seemed to make us all feel that if we could stick it out we were made of just a little bit better stuff than the fellows our age who were attending what we always thought were easier schools." Joe's self-a.s.surance rested not simply on the cultural milieu in which he grew to manhood but also on the special affection that his parents had showered on him as their only son and that his two sisters gave him as an adored elder brother.
After Boston Latin, in 1908 Joe moved on to Harvard, which, in response to nationwide pressure for more inst.i.tutional and political democracy and less concentration of wealth and power, was ostensibly committed to diversifying its student body. Yet old habits of social stratification remained as intense as they had been in the nineteenth century. Despite coming from Boston Latin, Joe had no claim on social status at Harvard, where the "golden boys" from the elite private schools such as Groton, St. Mark's, and St. Paul's, many of them the sons of millionaires, arrived at the college with servants and lived in luxurious residence halls with private baths, central heating, swimming pools, and squash courts. Joe joined the less affluent majority in drab, poorly heated dormitories with primitive plumbing. Characteristically, he had no sense of fixed inferiority from the sharp divisions he met at the university. Instead, he built a congenial social world on friendships with former Boston Latin cla.s.smates and ties to athletes, including some who came from the elite circle closed to someone of Joe's background. Within limits, Joe gained a measure of acceptability that spoke volumes about his potential for reaching heights not yet scaled by Boston's Irish. In his soph.o.m.ore year he and his closest friends became cla.s.s leaders, serving on the student council, organizing all major cla.s.s events, and winning entrance into significant clubs such as the Inst.i.tute of 1770, the d.i.c.key, and Hasty Pudding, which conferred high status on their members. Yet admission to the innermost circle of student standing through membership in the most prestigious clubs, such as Porcellian and AD, was denied him. For such appointments, one's pedigree still made all the difference.
On the ball field Joe had his frustrations as well. After making the freshman baseball team, a number of injuries kept him from the varsity until his junior year, and then another injury consigned him to the bench through most of his senior year. Only when team captain and starting pitcher Charles McLaughlin asked the coach to put Joe in the final Yale game did he manage to earn a coveted varsity letter, and later stories that Joe's father had arranged the subst.i.tution by threatening to withhold a license McLaughlin wanted to operate a movie theater in Boston diminished the accomplishment of having gained the prize. Other accounts describing Joe's refusal to give McLaughlin the game ball, which Joe caught for the final out, further tarnished his standing with cla.s.smates.
Only in the realm of business did Joe have an unmitigated sense of triumph while at Harvard. During the summers of his junior and senior years, he and a friend bought a tour bus from a failing business. Boldly approaching Mayor Fitzgerald for a license to operate from a bus stand at South Station, the city's choice location for such an enterprise, Joe turned an unprofitable venture into a going concern. With Joe acting as tour guide and his partner driving, they converted a $600 investment into an amazing $10,000 gain over two years.
After graduating in 1912, Joe decided on a career in banking, the "basic profession" on which all other businesses depended, as Joe put it. This was not the product of study in a Harvard economics or business course. (He later enjoyed describing how he had to drop a banking and finance course because he did so poorly in it.) Instead, Joe came to this conclusion through keenly observing contemporary American financial practices. That spring, congressional hearings had described how the "astounding" power and influence of bankers over the national economy gave anyone ambitious for wealth on a grand scale a model to imitate. And Joe Kennedy was nothing if not ambitious. Whereas progressives turned the power of the bankers into a justification for democratizing reform, Joe saw it as a compet.i.tive challenge. He wanted to be the first Irish American to penetrate a preserve of some of Boston's wealthiest and most prominent old-school families.
Harvard degree in hand, Joe became a clerk in his father's Columbia Trust. There, during the summer of 1912, he worked as an apprentice under Alfred Wellington, the bank's thirty-nine-year-old treasurer. Recognizing that his pupil had uncommon talent and ambition, Wellington urged him to become a state bank examiner as a way to learn the essentials of the industry. After he pa.s.sed the civil service exam and was placed on a list of potential examiners, Joe persuaded Mayor Fitzgerald to lobby the governor by pointing out that the state had no Irish Catholic bank examiners. The political pressure combined with Joe's merits to win him an appointment. For a year and a half he traveled around the state, learning the intricacies of the industry and impressing senior executives as a brilliant banker in the making.
As a consequence, when a downtown Boston bank threatened a takeover of Columbia Trust, Joe knew what he had to do to sustain the autonomy of one of the city's few Irish-owned financial inst.i.tutions: He needed to raise enough money to outbid the rival bank, which had made an offer that a majority of stockholders wanted to accept. He also knew that appeals to local pride could strengthen his case. But money was key, and the president of the city's mainline Merchants National Bank, who saw a Columbia Trust run by Joe as a good risk, provided it.
Joe's success on fending off the takeover won him, at age twenty-five, the presidency of Columbia and taught him the advantages of good publicity. Joe's victory and appointment to Columbia's top job became the subject of local and national newspaper accounts that grew in the telling. Encouraging-or at least not discouraging-exaggeration with each reporter who came calling, Joe Kennedy went from being the youngest bank president in Boston to the youngest in the country to the youngest in the world, and the small neighborhood Columbia magically became not a local depository but a mainstay of the national banking industry. All the positive accounts nearly doubled Columbia's deposits and increased loans by more than 50 percent during the three years Joe served as president. He planned to be a millionaire by the age of thirty-five, he told a reporter. At this rate, it seemed possible.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1906, when Joe was eighteen and Rose sixteen, the two fell in love. Except for Rose, who saw Joe as a complement in every way to her life's ambitions, the Fitzgeralds considered the young man and his family a step down. And between 1906 and 1914 Honey Fitz had done all he could to discourage the courtship. He forbade Rose from accompanying Joe to a Boston Latin dance or the Harvard junior prom, and would not even allow Joe in the Fitzgerald house. And, of course, Rose's years in Holland and New York were partly aimed at keeping Joe and Rose apart. 1906, when Joe was eighteen and Rose sixteen, the two fell in love. Except for Rose, who saw Joe as a complement in every way to her life's ambitions, the Fitzgeralds considered the young man and his family a step down. And between 1906 and 1914 Honey Fitz had done all he could to discourage the courtship. He forbade Rose from accompanying Joe to a Boston Latin dance or the Harvard junior prom, and would not even allow Joe in the Fitzgerald house. And, of course, Rose's years in Holland and New York were partly aimed at keeping Joe and Rose apart.
But the attraction between Rose and Joe endured. They were smitten with each other. "I was never seriously interested in anyone else," Joe later said. Rose was more effusive: She remembered the young Joe Kennedy as "tall, thin, wiry, freckled," with blue eyes and red hair, "not dark red, orange red, or gold red, as some Irish have, but sandy blond with a lot of red lights in it." His "open and expressive" face conveyed a "youthful dignity," which bespoke self-reliance and self-respect. He was serious, "but he had a quick wit and a responsive sense of humor." His "big, spontaneous, and infectious grin ... made everybody in sight want to smile, too." They arranged to meet at friends' homes, always with "a responsible adult on the premises." And in 1914 the romance blossomed into promises of marriage that Honey Fitz could no longer resist. Forced to abandon another run for the mayor's office by rumors of his affair with "Toodles" Ryan, a beautiful cigarette girl, Fitzgerald had lost enough public standing to make Joe, the successful young banker, a worthy-or at least tolerable-addition to the Fitzgerald family. After a four-month engagement lasting from June to October 1914, Rose and Joe were married in a relatively subdued ceremony in William Cardinal O'Connell's private chapel, followed by a wedding breakfast for seventy-five guests at the Fitzgerald house. Fitz's diminished stature and a lingering reluctance about establishing ties with the Kennedys made Rose's matrimony a less celebrated event than her coming-out.
In November the young couple, Joe twenty-six and Rose twenty-four, moved into a comfortable two-and-a-half-story house on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, a Boston Protestant enclave made up of second- and third-generation lower-middle-cla.s.s laborers and middle-cla.s.s professionals. The seven-room Kennedy house on Beals Street, a gray wooden structure with clapboard siding, a large porch, sloping roof, and dormer windows, put Joe $6,500 in debt. The $2,000 personal loan and $4,500 mortgage was a heavy financial burden, but Joe could not imagine a bank president living in a rented apartment. Moreover, he had every confidence that he was on an ascending financial trajectory that would allow him to pay off his loans and ent.i.tled him and Rose to drive a new Model T Ford, which he also bought with borrowed funds. A seven-dollar-a-week maid who cooked, cleaned, laundered, and served meals was also considered appropriate to their lifestyle.
The following summer their first child was born at Nantasket Beach in Hull, Ma.s.sachusetts, where Joe rented a house next to his in-laws. Two doctors, a trained nurse, and a housemaid attended the birth of the nearly ten-pound boy. Though speculation was rife that the child would be named after his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, Joe insisted that his firstborn son be christened Joseph Patrick Jr. Despite Honey Fitz's disappointment at not having his first grandson named after him, he expected the boy to have an extraordinary future: "He is is going to be President of the United States," the ex-mayor told a reporter, "his mother and father have already decided that he is going to Harvard, where he will play on the football and baseball teams and incidentally take all the scholastic honors. Then he's going to be a captain of industry until it's time for him to be President for two or three terms. Further than that has not been decided. He may act as mayor of Boston and governor of Ma.s.sachusetts for a while on his way to the presidential chair." Fitzgerald's tongue-in-cheek description was the true word said in jest: ambition and unlimited confidence were central features of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy outlook. going to be President of the United States," the ex-mayor told a reporter, "his mother and father have already decided that he is going to Harvard, where he will play on the football and baseball teams and incidentally take all the scholastic honors. Then he's going to be a captain of industry until it's time for him to be President for two or three terms. Further than that has not been decided. He may act as mayor of Boston and governor of Ma.s.sachusetts for a while on his way to the presidential chair." Fitzgerald's tongue-in-cheek description was the true word said in jest: ambition and unlimited confidence were central features of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy outlook.
Less than two years later, the birth of Rose and Joe's second child was greeted with less fanfare. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a healthy boy named after his irrepressible grandfather, came into the world on the afternoon of May 29, 1917. Born in an upstairs bedroom in the Beals Street home with the same contingent of doctors and helpers as attended Joe Jr.'s birth, Jack, as the new baby was called, received his first notice in the press from a proud grandfather "wearing a pleased smile." Against the backdrop of an America that had entered the First World War, in which so many young men seemed certain to die, predictions about Jack's future were left unspoken.
THE SAME DAY Jack was born, his father was elected to the board of the Ma.s.sachusetts Electric Company, making him at twenty-eight one of the youngest trustees of a major corporation in America. It was the start of Joe's meteoric climb in the business world, which, paradoxically, the war would serve. World War I, which millions of Americans saw as an idealistic crusade to end national conflicts and preserve democracy, elicited little enthusiasm from Joe. The idea of sacrificing his life or that of any of his generation seemed absurd. He was too cynical about human nature and Europe's traditional strife to believe that anything particularly good could come out of the fighting. Though this put him at odds with most of his Harvard friends, many of whom volunteered for military service, Joe saw nothing to be gained personally or nationally by enlisting. The war, he said, was a senseless slaughter that would ruin victor and vanquished alike. Looking down at Joe Jr. in his crib after hearing the news that tens of thousands of British troops had died in the unsuccessful 1916 Somme offensive, Joe told Rose, "This is the only happiness that lasts." Jack was born, his father was elected to the board of the Ma.s.sachusetts Electric Company, making him at twenty-eight one of the youngest trustees of a major corporation in America. It was the start of Joe's meteoric climb in the business world, which, paradoxically, the war would serve. World War I, which millions of Americans saw as an idealistic crusade to end national conflicts and preserve democracy, elicited little enthusiasm from Joe. The idea of sacrificing his life or that of any of his generation seemed absurd. He was too cynical about human nature and Europe's traditional strife to believe that anything particularly good could come out of the fighting. Though this put him at odds with most of his Harvard friends, many of whom volunteered for military service, Joe saw nothing to be gained personally or nationally by enlisting. The war, he said, was a senseless slaughter that would ruin victor and vanquished alike. Looking down at Joe Jr. in his crib after hearing the news that tens of thousands of British troops had died in the unsuccessful 1916 Somme offensive, Joe told Rose, "This is the only happiness that lasts."
Joe's response to the First World War set a pattern that would repeat itself in other international crises faced by the United States. Whereas he was more often than not brilliantly insightful about domestic affairs, particularly the country's economic prospects, Joe consistently misjudged external developments. He understood world problems not on moral or political grounds but rather on how he felt they might inhibit his entrepreneurial ventures and, worse, cut short his life or, later, that of his sons. These personal fears would make him a lifelong isolationist.
Joe's rapid acc.u.mulation of wealth began with his departure from the bank and appointment as a.s.sistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel's Fore River shipbuilding plant in Quincy, Ma.s.sachusetts. Though a salary of $15,000 a year was not enough to make Joe a wealthy man, his defense work a.s.suaged his conscience about avoiding military service. More important, the experience, business contacts, and, most of all, the chance to demonstrate his effectiveness in managing a multimillion-dollar enterprise were invaluable in opening the way to bigger opportunities. During his eighteen months at Fore River, beginning in September 1917, Joe worked constantly, sometimes sleeping in his office for only one or two hours a night. Others worked as hard as Joe, but they lacked the inventiveness for efficiency and effectiveness he brought to every task. When he left Bethlehem in the summer of 1919, he received a bonus check "for services rendered at a time when no one else could have done what you did."
Joe converted his wartime success as a manager at Bethlehem into a job as a stockbroker with the prestigious Boston firm of Hayden, Stone and Company. Believing that the greatest possibility to acc.u.mulate wealth in the coming decade would be in the stock market, Joe used his $10,000-a-year job to turn "inside" information into disciplined speculation that netted him nearly two million dollars over the next six years. Joe had made good on his promise to make his first million before he turned thirty-five, and after leaving Hayden, Stone in 1923 to open his own office, he made millions more trading stocks and in the movie industry, by buying first movie theaters in Ma.s.sachusetts and then an English-owned Hollywood production company. After selling all his movie holdings in 1930, he made another fortune in the liquor trade when Prohibition ended in 1933.
Joe's growing wealth allowed him and Rose to have several more children. In 1918 Rosemary, a tragically r.e.t.a.r.ded child, was the first of four successive daughters: Kathleen, born in 1920; Eunice, in 1921; and Patricia, in 1924. Three more children-Robert Francis, born in 1925; Jean Ann, in 1928; and Edward Moore, in 1932-would make Joe and Rose the parents of nine children over a seventeen-year span. Joe and Rose took great joy in their large contingent; it distinguished them in an era when most upwardly mobile families had abandoned the tradition of having many children. Joe enjoyed telling the story of how he had missed Patricia's birth because of nonstop business negotiations in New York. On his return home, the five elder children, ranging in age from two to nine, greeted him at the train station with shouts: "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! We've got another baby! We've got another baby!" Joe remembered other pa.s.sengers on the platform probably thinking: "What that fellow there certainly doesn't need right now is another baby another baby."
Joe loved that his large family made him and Rose an object of public attention. He also loved the message sent by his being able to provide lavishly for so large a brood. In 1921 he had moved the family into a larger Brookline house only a five-minute walk from Beals Street at the intersection of Naples and Abbotsford Roads. The twelve-room two-and-a-half-story house with a long enclosed front porch, where the Kennedy children could play, provided enough room not only for the whole family but also for a hospital-trained live-in nursemaid and a separate room for Rose, where she could have a small measure of privacy from the daily challenge of raising so many children. It was a challenge at which neither Joe nor Rose could claim unqualified success.
FOR ALL THE FAMILY'S WEALTH, status, and outward appearance of unity and good cheer, Joe and Rose had personal issues that strained their marriage and burdened their children. Rose's religious education, the intense requirements of her orthodoxy, left limited room for the joy her comfortable existence opened to her. For Joe, the harshness of the social slights he had suffered at Harvard, at their summer homes, and in the banking and business worlds from folks contemptuous of upstarts like him rankled throughout his life and drained some of the pleasure from his rise to prominence.
To be sure, they were a well-matched couple-similar backgrounds, similar aspirations for wealth and prominence-but they were also decidedly different: complementary opposites. Rose was the consummate conformist. She meticulously followed the social mores of the day, whether set down by her church or by the larger society around her. Joe, too, was a great conformist-striving to achieve a kind of universal acceptability-but he also prided himself on being unconventional: bolder, more adventurous than everyone else, and, if need be, a rule breaker. Innovation, thinking imaginatively, would be a hallmark of his business career and a trait he pa.s.sed along to a few-though not all-of his children.
Joe's independence and willingness to defy accepted standards partly expressed itself in compulsive womanizing. Speculation abounds that Rose's unresponsiveness to a man with normal appet.i.tes drove him into the arms of chorus girls, starlets, and other casual lovers. A mainstay of Kennedy family biographies is the story of Joe teasing Rose in front of friends about her s.e.xual inhibitions. "Now listen, Rosie," he would say. "This idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong. It was not part of our contract at the altar, the priest never said that and the books don't argue that. And if you don't open your mind on this, I'm going to tell the priest on you." But Rose apparently remained unresponsive to Joe's desires. According to one family friend, after their last child was born in 1932, Rose declared, "No more s.e.x," and moved into a separate bedroom.
But even if Rose had not denied him her favors, Joe would have been a compulsive philanderer. For someone who needed to win, win, win, who could never be content with great success in one arena, who spent his life seeking new challenges in business-banking, liquor, movies, stocks, real estate-and politics, it is difficult to imagine that he would have been content with one woman.
Joe made little effort to hide his womanizing. In 1921, for example, he brazenly wrote a theatrical manager in New York: "I hope you will have all the good looking girls in your company looking forward with antic.i.p.ation to meeting the high Irish of Boston because I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat." A political reporter who knew Joe thought that for him women "were another thing that a rich man had-like caviar. It wasn't s.e.x, it was part of the image ... his idea of manliness." Joe even brought mistresses into the Kennedy home, the young women eating meals with the family and becoming part of the daily household routine. Betty Spalding, the wife of one of Jack's closest friends, who witnessed the process, exclaimed, "And the old man-having his mistresses there at the house for lunch and supper! I couldn't understand it! It was unheard of." Joe served propriety by describing the young women to visitors as friends of his daughters.
But there were some limits. An affair with movie actress Gloria Swanson in the late 1920s almost broke up the Kennedy marriage. The romance was an open secret, with one Boston newspaper reporting that Joe's phone calls to Gloria in California from New York amounted to "the largest private telephone bill in the nation during the year 1929," even though Joe had taken precautions to ensure that the affair was never so obvious that Rose would be unable to deny its existence to herself and others. But there is evidence that Honey Fitz argued with Joe over the affair, threatening to tell Rose if Joe did not end it. Stubbornly, Joe refused, warning his father-in-law that he might then divorce Rose and marry Gloria. Though Joe eventually broke off the relationship with Swanson when he left the movie industry in 1929-30, it scarred the Kennedy household and made for difficulties with the children that never disappeared.
Like Joe, Rose was an imperfect parent. Part of her difficulty was Joe's insistence that she confine herself to "women's work" in the family. Generally, she played the good wife and repressed her irritation at being inhibited by her overbearing husband. "Your father again has restricted my activities and thinks the little woman should confine herself to the home," she complained to the children in February 1942. Rose was also unhappy with Joe's many absences attending to business in New York and California, which threw the burden of child rearing largely on her. Despite a large retinue of household help, she was under constant pressure to attend to the needs of so many small children during repeated pregnancies. Indeed, between 1914 and 1932, the eighteen years after she and Joe married, Rose was with child nearly 40 percent of the time. Moreover, a sense of isolation from her previously glamorous life as the mayor's favorite daughter and a prominent Boston debutante joined with Joe's philandering to drive her into a brief separation from him early in 1920. Pregnant with her fourth child and exhausted by mothering three others between the a